Paradigm Shift: English Language Learners II

On my Thursday, June 16 post, I wrote about some thoughts I had regarding some of the difficulty ELL students can encounter when entering our classrooms. These thoughts were spurred by the Enriching Content Classes for Secondary ESOL Students class I attended recetly in Colorado Springs. If there's one thing I hate it's someone who will pose a problem without offering a solution, which is what I did the other day, because it was getting real late and I had meetings the next day. So, here are some strategies for increasing comprehension in our ELL students, despite the highly specialized vocabularies each content area requires.

Our instructor for the course, Sara, illustrated some of the frustration ELL students can incur in our classrooms. She played a video of a woman speaking Farsi who was, in large part, non-descript in her delivery. The video was 59 seconds long, but it seemed like it was at least three times that. As a class we were only able to pick out a couple of words and that's only because they were cognates. Then we watched the same woman speaking Farsi but more animated this time and with visuals to represent what she was explaining.

Since I can't do the lesson justice and I don't want to ruin it for those who will take the class in the near future, I will not go into any specifics other than to just note that we were able to decipher much more of what she was teaching us, including several details. The second video lasted about 30 seconds longer, but she spoke at about the same pace both times. The extra time came from her demonstrating what she was talking about and pausing occassionally to give us time to process the information. Now, the sceptic in you might raise the point that it took her 50 percent more time to teach it the second time. Ya, but we got it the second time.

Just for the record, I didn't pick out any words from the first video because I zoned out after about 10 seconds of not knowing the language being used. What a great lesson on the perspective of someone immersed in another language.

Later in the class, Sara delivered a short ecology lesson in Spanish. She read it from a book. Since it was Spanish, we were able to pick out a few more words than we were in the Farsi lesson. However, there was also a false cognate in there so that threw a few of us off. Sara questioned us in Spanish about the contents of the lesson and asked that we answer in Spanish as well. As you might imagine, her comprehension check revealed exactly what we learned about ecology. Not much.

Even a couple of the Spanish teachers struggled a little bit with the lesson. Why? They are non-native Spanish speakers--they learned Spanish as a second language. If I remember the structure of my high school and college Spanish classes correctly, we learned much more social vocabulary than academic vocabulary. Hence, Spanish teachers have far greater exposure to social vocabulary than content-specific vocabulary. Again, learning the academic language of different curricula can be like learning completely different languages.

After the check for comprehension, Sara delivered the brief lesson again. This time she provided important vocabulary (in Spanish), which served as labels for graphics and pictures of those words. She pointed to those graphics when she spoke them in the lesson. I'm sure it comes as no surprise to you that we were able follow along with the lesson much better. Plus, we were able to demonstrate our learning by answering in Spanish (one or two word answers) or at least pointing to the answer.

So what strategies did I get from these parts of the class?

Label everything in English so ELL students can see the word and have a visual to associate with it. For example, I will label several parts of the computers like the keyboard, mouse, power button, USB, Ethernet, Firewire ports, internal speaker, etc.
Being animated in my teaching helps my ELL students as well as my native English speakers.
Pointing to objects and acting things out increases their comprehension.
Give them repetitive opportunities to see, hear, read, and write important vocabulary. Some of that came from some "getting to know you" activities we did at the beginning of the class. However, those can easily be changed into "getting to know the curriculum" activities, without the writing being too intense.